Florida fiasco keeps Bush's votes in safe hands

The 2000 election in Florida represented a huge conflict of interest, as the state Governor, Jeb Bush, was the brother of the Republican presidential nominee, and the person in charge of conducting the election, the Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was doubling as George Bush's campaign co-chair. The conflict has persisted, in one form or another, over the past four years. The Republican Party finds itself in an unusual position in Florida: although voter registration slightly favours the Democrats, the Republicans have managed to engineer the demographics - through the gerrymandering of electoral districts - so that they have a lock on both houses of the state legislature and the Governor's office. They control almost all the machinery of government, including, in large part, the management of elections. While they may have paid lip service to electoral reform after the 2000 fiasco, clearly their party interest lay in continuing to suppress Democratic votes while maximising the access of their own supporters.  [more ]